This project seeks to explore the personal projections and public ideologies regarding family building expressed by a six-year cohort of young, single women, in structured interviews collected in a national survey in 1955. It is a project in historical demography with substantive implications for social history and life course studies, and which proposes a novel methodology with implications for all social and cultural disciplines that employ archival material. The project builds upon work at the juncture of social history, demography, and anthropology and will develop a dimension lacking in demographic modeling. We adopt a life-course perspective, relating current concerns to the shape of plans for the future, on the one hand, and to prior experience, on the other. Family building, in our perspective, "is seen as an ordinary or 'natural' part of adult life. It is the way that respondents interpret ordinariness which is situationally determined." Such commonplace signification is determined at the individual level by a complex of values and cognitions in which both unspoken social and articulated ideological elements play significant parts. The birth cohort serves as a link between period behavior and the larger "historical" world; and the perspective of the life course encourages the linking of age-specific and circumstance-specific experiences and perceptions of individuals and the aggregate behavior of cohorts. Methodologically, the project seeks to employ two sets of concepts derived in part a priori from a variety of literatures outside social demography to analyze the ideological and the formal-narrative content of the questionnaries. Our intention is to explicate fully the fine open-ended data in these documents by systematicaly "annotating" the data according to these concepts, employing interactive computing to move toward holistic typology, and then beyond typology in a quasi-statistical fashion. We believe such a method is replicable, suitable for many applications in secondary analysis, and here constitutes a historically-contextualized approach to social-demographic analysis that points a way beyond reductionist models.